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Strategies & Market Trends : Booms, Busts, and Recoveries -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Don Lloyd who wrote (11950)	12/19/2001 10:29:07 AM
From: Ilaine	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74559

Hi Don - yes, I did check out Rothbard's The Mystery of Banking and some others by Rothbard, but started reading Money and Banking: The American Experience, published by George Mason University Press, and got enthralled by a chapter written by Ronald W. Batchelder and David Glasner, "Debt, Deflation, the Great Depression and the Gold Standard," and then through them to The Gold Standard by Ralph G. Hawtrey (1933). I need to understand how the gold standard was supposed to work in theory, and how it worked in actuality, before I read anything else about that time frame. Hawtrey is good. I discovered that I could have a 6 mb website hosted by GMU because I am a student, and there is a lab with all the various programs on the computers, plus a lab in the history department. I've signed up for a class for publishing history via new media, and workshops using a lot of different programs, including DreamWeaver. Also downloaded a copy of DreamWeaver. Right now I am drawing up a list of concepts I want to define via hyperlinks, and working on definitions: What is a depression? . . . recession? . . . speculation? . . . a bubble? . . . the gold standard? . . . the gold exchange standard? . . . sterilization? . . . money? . . . fractional reserve banking . . .? . . . bank panics? The Federal Reserve? First Bank of the United States? Second Bank of the United States? Bimetalism? Arbitrage? Credit? Mortgages? Consumer credit? Callable loans? Hot money? High powered money? Panic of 1837. Panic of 1857. Panic of 1873. Panic of 1893. Panic of 1907. [Note the apparent symmetry - this may explain why some economists started believing in waves, a complete waste of time as far as I am concerned, similar to astrology.] Tariffs. Smoot-Hawley tariff - why, and what effect. Speculations and swindles - not the same thing. Florida land bubble. Buying on margin. Where does credit come from? How does credit become money? Monetarism. Other economic schools - classical, neoclassical, Keynsian, Austrian. Communism. Third International. Labor movement. Strikes. Populism. Anyway, I'll start like that and keep adding. Everyone remains vague about the events of 1930, which I find encouraging. They are very good up to about the time of the Great Crash, and then pick back up in 1931, when the banks start failing. That gives me something to contribute. Some like to remain in their comfortable offices and theorize, some like to dig in dusty archives searching for facts. I love the sweet smell of dusty old paper. :)

To: Don Lloyd who wrote (11950)	12/19/2001 10:48:07 AM
From: Ilaine	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74559

BTW, re: German hyperinflation. It was deliberate. When the French occupied the Ruhr valley in 1922 in order to force the Germans to pay reparations, the Germans in the factories went on strike rather than work for the French occupation forces. In order to provide for the strikers, the German government gave the German generals plates to print Reichsmarks and told them to print as much as was needed. As soon as the French and the Germans negotiated an agreement whereby the French pulled out, the Germans introduced a new currency, as you posted, the Rentenmark, which halted the hyperinflation dead. They could have done that at any time. The hyperinflation had the salutary effect of getting rid of a lot of debt. Of course, if you were a creditor, you did not like being wiped out. But remember, the Germans were in the process of getting rid of the nobility and so forth. Out with the old, in with the new. Rothbard probably did not know this, which is one reason I approach him, and all economists, with caution. As Mark Twain said about scientists: >>There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesome returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact - Mark Twain<< I find the same to be true of economists. ;^) BTW, I assume you ( or someone) scanned the segment you posted - can't imagine you actually typed "the middle clam." -g-